Samba: How to share files for your LAN without user/password

This tutorial will show how to set samba to allow read-only file sharing for your LAN computers as guest (without be prompted for a password).

Because users won’t be prompted for a user/password, this tutorial is meant to be installed in a LAN where all host are to be trusted.

There is many advantages of sharing files in a LAN. For instance, when you have a multimedia box (playing music, movies….) it is great to be able to access the music on that box from any machines in your LAN.

Let’s get started. In the first place, you need to have samba installed.

sudo apt-get install samba

Because we are going to make samba security insecure, make sure only your local network can access samba service. To do so, open and edit /etc/samba/smb.conf

sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

and set interfaces to lo and your local network interface. In my case: eth1.

interfaces = lo eth1
bind interfaces only = true

Now, it is time to smoothen samba default security by changing the security variable: security and make sure it is set to share instead of user and that guest account is enabled:

security = share
...
...
guest account = nobody

Now, we can create a share to be accessible to guest users:

[Guest Share]
        comment = Guest access share
        path = /path/to/dir/to/share
        browseable = yes
        read only = yes
        guest ok = yes

You can now test that your configuration is good using testparm:

testparm

If everything is fine, it is time to reload samba service to have your new configuration taken into account:

sudo /etc/init.d/samba reload

That’s it, anybody in your LAN can now access your share.